Ethereal Agriculture, # 2— “Never Done, Leastways”

Ethereal Agriculture, # 2— “Never Done, Leastways”

“Okay,” said Jerrick, “I know our range of produce is lacking, but we can make up for it in quantity.”

“Is the compost and manure enough to expand our plot?” said Baker.

“It will be. Time is on our side. As long as someone in the Universe wants carrots and potatoes, we’ll have a buyer.”

When produce was shipped into a Portal Willow, the Market of the Multiverse always matched the perfect potential buyer with whatever the merchant was selling. For all worlds that had access to portals, they would potentially be buying Jerrick’s produce.

Jerrick would select the best produce for his dinner table, after harvesting their seeds. Despite the food being much duller than Baker and Olive were used to, they never were starving. Even a farm as small as Jerrick’s could produce over a year’s supply of food for dozens and dozens of people. All of this could be done with the mere two farmhands he kept, who lived with him on his hamlet on the Plane of Flora.

Jerrick busied himself with juicing carrots. People wouldn’t pay much for carrots, but cold carrot juice was prized by those who drank it, and what was left of the carrots could be fed to the animals. The juicer was bought after selling 1/10th of his produce’s worth of Coin in the Spring, after adjusting the pay for his farm hands. This juicer, though expensive, was built to last, and at this stage of their operation, was enough to meet all their needs for pressing fruits and vegetables.

The apples on his farm weren’t very special, but they made a fine cider. He and his farmhands reserved apples for daily dining, and Jerrick attempted to squeeze out some more coin by making ordinary cider, as well as hard cider.

Both types of cider were spiced, and that meant either growing spices or buying them, and for now only the latter was possible. Spices were expensive, which meant in turn the ciders were expensive.

The hard cider required a means of storing the cider while it fermented, and so far they had ten five-gallon brewing buckets, which of course would produce fifty gallons of hard cider after a month, and bottling it into jugs was an all-day affair with the equipment they had available. Moreover, unless the jugs were returned, they had to factor in the cost of those as well. But at the end of the day, the convenience of the Market of the Multiverse meant that whatever you were selling, there would always be a yield if someone in the Universe was willing to buy it.

Cider wasn’t like apples, because when people ate apples, they were sensitive to the quality. However, when an alcoholic was selecting hard cider, Golden Apple brand caught the eye of some as passable quality, as well as inexpensive.

Bottle returning was not as easy as Jerrick hoped, even when there was a Coin deposit that you wouldn’t get back without returning the bottles. He'd still lose out on at least a quarter of his bottles, which meant increasing the cost of the cider, which meant selling less of it.

Even more so than jugs, there would be missing caps on at least a third of the returns, meaning he continually needed to spend Coin for refreshers. Bottle caps feasibly would be a unit of currency, considering the inevitability that he would need them.

As of now, two of the ten buckets used to ferment cider were reserved for the consumption of Jerrick and his two farmhands, Olive and Baker. With little access to recreation, one of their few modes of entertainment was a few decks of Bicycles and mugs of the plentiful cider. There weren’t many teetotalers on the Plane of Flora to gripe, and if there were, the Laws of the Plane determined that they couldn’t impose their will very easily, as the landscape allowed as much property as could feasibly be maintained by a given farmer.

Jerrick surveyed the expansion to their garden with contentment. They were tripling the size of their projected yield, as they now had tools and other goods that would make an expanded plot size easier to manage. Two of them were wheeled devices that would make planting and plowing much easier, so they’d have a whole new farmhand able to complete other tasks.

Those two tools had used up another 1/10th of their Spring yield, after adjusted wages.

“So, carrots for the win, huh?” said Olive.

“In my opinion, the world can never get enough potatoes,” said Baker.

“Mmmm,” said Jerrick, “there’s always a market for french fries.”

“And potato chips,” said Olive.

“And vodka,” said Baker.

“If you can make alcohol out of potatoes, doesn’t that mean you can do it with carrots?” said Olive.

“I can never snack on enough sugar snap peas,” said Jerrick, “But carrot juice is the most efficient product per acre. Then we have blueberries, which will be our long game. It will take another year before they yield, but that will mean we won’t have to worry about harvesting them this year.”

Olive said, “Is there any way we can make butter any easier?”

So far, butter-churning was such drudgery that they barely made enough from themselves, and Baker would wax in dismay if they didn’t have enough of what he called, “good grease”.

In the first months of ascending to Flora, Baker had sweated himself a fine collection of nasty pimples, his body purging the nasty life-habits he had once had. Yet he craved fats, and admittedly so did Jerrick and Olive.

Olive simply complained less, though in truth Baker became the harder worker, after he had strengthened himself over the course of a year. In fact, Baker seemed to be compensating, as though if he toiled hard enough, Nature would make him happy.

“Cheese-making equipment is a good idea,” said Jerrick, “but we’ll have to go without bacon, chicken, and beef for three months.”

The look on Baker’s face was a look of dread.

“Mother of God,” he said.

“Excuse you,” said Jerrick and Olive in unison.